A transcript of Episode 240 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom, and Lisa Welchman talk about our responsibility as designers and creators of digital products, services and information..
This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Janine Beck.
Transcript
James Royal-Lawson
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Computer voice
UX Podcast, episode 240.
[Music]
Per Axbom
Hello, I’m Per Axbom.
James Royal-Lawson
And I’m James Royal-Lawson.
Per Axbom
This is UX Podcast. We’re in Stockholm, Sweden and you’re listening in 194 countries all over the world from the Bahamas, to Lithuania.
James Royal-Lawson
From time to time, we bring you a repeat show. This is an episode from our extensive back catalogue resurfacing some of the ideas and thoughts on the past that we believe are still relevant and well worth visiting.
James Royal-Lawson
We had the opportunity to chat to Lisa, again, when we were at UXLX in June. Couldn’t possibly turn that down. We sat, and we got quite philosophical, and we started talking about our responsibility as designers during the digital age.
Per Axbom
It’s seriously one of the best conversations about UX I’ve ever had. I think.
James Royal-Lawson
You reckon?
Per Axbom
Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
Okay.
Per Axbom
So I’ve had top 10. Most certainly, it’s got me thinking about so much that I actually brought back into my blog posts, into my – how I explain UX to people.
James Royal-Lawson
I think to be honest, I think that’s true for both of the chats we’ve had with Lisa, this year; this one you’re about to hear and Episode 92 earlier in the year. She’s a great thinker.
Per Axbom
She is.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
And we are joined well yet again by Lisa Welshman.
Lisa Welchman
Yes. But in person sitting across from you. It’s awesome.
It’s very different, isn’t it?
Per Axbom
Yeah. And I love it.
James Royal-Lawson
And I’m taking – my take on this is “I’m not bored of talking to Lisa yet.”
Per Axbom
No.
James Royal-Lawson
“So no one else can possibly be bored yet of listening to her.”
Per Axbom
And we should always bring a microphone as soon as we’re talking to Lisa actually is what we found.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah.
Lisa Welchman
Oh, because I say things! [Laughing]
Per Axbom
You say things! [Laughing]
James Royal-Lawson
What was the quote that you got told off for? Well not told off for, but –
Lisa Welchman
Oh, I’m not going to say it.
James Royal-Lawson
[Laughing] I will find it while we’re talking. [Laughing]. Though at this conference, you’ve not only done a workshop, which you had this morning, which is centred around digital governance. But you also did the presentation on the conference day. Are we architecting the Information Age? Which I liked. I tweeted that it was like a call for arms for UXers to to stand up and make a difference.
Per Axbom
It was kind of unexpected. I didn’t know what you were gonna do.
Lisa Welchman
Unexpected from me or just unexpected?
Per Axbom
Yeah. From you, because I was sort of thinking about the things we’ve been talking about before, but then this was more like – and it made me think a lot about – okay, so you were asking who was accountable for the information design? You were saying “we are”. And I was thinking, “well, how important is that, really”? And you’re saying, “well, we’re moving into the information age, and this is going to change everything”. And then all of a sudden, this stone on my heart, like “yes, Jesus, this is, this is heavy”.
James Royal-Lawson
I love the comparison to the information – to the industrial age, and how we just polluted the hell out of the earth back then.
Per Axbom
Yeah somebody decided that fossil fuels was a good idea, or did they? Did anybody stop to think about what we were doing back then?
Lisa Welchman
Well it was an incremental thing.
Per Axbom
Exactly.
Lisa Welchman
So we started burning things for energy a long time ago, probably before we call things ages, I would imagine. Quite some time before that. So I think it’s okay. I think, though, that we should learn from the past. Right, and try not to make the same mistakes. And so I think we have a sense of global scope about the world and the nature of the web and the internet is global.
So everyone’s talking about globalisation. But with this technology, it really is true. I mean, things move very quickly across the globe, the amount of news that I get about other parts of the world, even from when I was a child, it’s just immense. I don’t have to wait for it to get to the newspaper. So I think that pace really makes a difference. And so that makes it kind of extra good and extra scary all at the same time.
And it might seem surprising to you that I would be talking about that, but I think one of the things that people don’t really know about me and the work that I do is that it’s not governance that I’m really interested in. It’s enabling digital.
And so I kind of hone in on governance because I see it as a blocker, for actually doing digital well. So when you think about it from that perspective, I’m very interested in the information age. I’m very interested politically and socially and ethically about what we can do with this technology. So when I see digital teams working in a kind of stupid way, I’m like, “that’s not good. We’re not going to get good things if we don’t get that”. So I’m really just trying to remove a blocker. And if it all goes away, I’ll move on to the next thing. So.
James Royal-Lawson
Who has responsibility too. We talked about yesterday, like who is responsible for the outcomes from information design, and then went on to who is responsible for the consequences of bad design or bad information? I think that’s one of the things that made me start to think about, yeah, you know, the things we do, or we know sometimes that we’re doing stuff that’s why we use phrases like “technical debt” and “design debt” and things.
Per Axbom
Yeah, stuff that we fail to deal – but we’re leaving it behind and we have to catch up with it at some time in the future, but we never do really. But at the same time, also talk about other people, other designers and other companies that actually, you see that they don’t do any good work at all. They don’t think about accessibility. They sort of trick their clients into buying stuff that they shouldn’t be buying. And so there’s so many aspects of this. And when you onstage asked everybody, “are you doing your best work?”, that struck a chord with me because I realised? “I’m not sure”.
Lisa Welchman
Yeah, I don’t think any of us are really sure if we’re doing our best work. I think we have a idea in our heads about what that might look like, and sometimes a little bit of a fantasy, or escape exercise around “yeah, I’m doing that”, because it leaves you in a comfortable place. But I think a lot of people are not doing their best work and as it relates to what you were talking about, just ahead of that, which is really about accountability.
I think, as what we do becomes more and more relevant to individuals, as well as mission critical to business, but I care about business but not so much. I’m really thinking about the individual people that this impacts, you know, a cancer patient, getting the right information about how to take care of themselves, at the right time, right? And at what point do those things become really connected and really serious.
For instance, for a while, telephones seemed like they were this fun to have nice to have thing, and now we’re at a place where I mean, they’re going out now but just think back in the day right, legislation was passed to ensure that everyone could have a telephone.
Per Axbom
Yeah.
Lisa Welchman
Right because it became so critical and important and it became a necessary thing for people have in order to function in the world. So I think some sorts of digital capacity are starting to move in that direction. The first and foremost is internet connectivity. Right? So, UN has declared that access to the internet is a human right?
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, which is fantastic.
Lisa Welchman
So we’re nowhere near that, people having global access. Now there’s some social anthropological conversations we can have about people who do or may not want to be connected to the internet. But pushing those aside gently for a moment, there are people who would like to have access to the internet that can’t afford it or that where a business may not think that it’s important enough to extend their footprint or profitable enough to extend their footprint to allow that. So I think there’s a lot of capacity building around that, that’s really important for us to really consider and inform the conversation.
So UX going beyond an interface, and UX going beyond the entire experience, including influencing and talking about the infrastructure that supports that. So I think that’s really important. And there’s decisions being made around that right now. And I don’t think people are realising important things are being thought about. We’re thinking about how do you make money on it? You know, how do you do cool stuff with it? But not really, you know, how do you maintain someone’s health? Right? Or how does someone alert someone that they’re ill? So it’s interesting. I don’t mean to bum you out?
James Royal-Lawson
No.
Per Axbom
We did touch upon this when we were talking about the phone on the episode, we were talking about how phones are hard to use for some people and the aspects of accessibility and do we need to legislate around accessibility because if people are expected to always perform their tasks and, like my municipality where I’m in involved is, okay, so nobody ever signs up for daycare on paper anymore. Everybody has a computer, but not everybody has access to a computer. Some people have to go to the library. And is that fair? So what are we doing to support that development?
Lisa Welchman
Well, then there’s the school aspect of that. So my son went to school, and US use private school, so they can make whatever rules they want. But there was a requirement when he got to high school that he had a laptop. So I could buy that for him. So it was really great. And so there’s issues around the digital divide, do we actually supply children whose parents can’t afford certain types of hardware for them so that they can actually, one, learn the skills of using that technology, right, and gain the knowledge and understand how to access knowledge, because there’s a tremendous advantage for people who learn how to access information. And so there’s just a lot of sort of philosophical ethical considerations.
And sometimes I feel like those debates take place on a playing ground with politicians and people who have political or business motivations, but not those who have digital expertise, or actually understand how these systems work and flow or have a design sense. And so that’s a shame, right? And I think it’s our own immaturity in industry of just kind of thinking of ourselves as makers, like who are sort of being told to make things and we will make things and they will be good, right? But not this kind of thing is architects, of an entire experience or of an infrastructure that’s going to support a type of experience that might be very broad.
James Royal-Lawson
And we’ve touched a few times about ethics within UX. When we had a chat, a few weeks ago, we talked about the persuader. Sometimes when you have to do maybe some more persuasive techniques on a website to get it to meet business goals. At times you kind of – you want – you don’t want to be part of it, because this is not maybe something you agree with; tricking people into doing sound stuff, and I think there’s an important aspect of UX design. I think – well, in the design work we do we need to have a social responsibility and not be part of things that aren’t maybe morally in line with our own personal ethics.
Lisa Welchman
Well, and that’s interesting, because there’s complexity in that because there’s diversity in the UX community. And so there might be some really good or quality UXers that have really good skills, but they don’t have the same ethical framework that you have.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah.
Lisa Welchman
Right. And that’s a shame, because I probably agree with you all about how things should go. But we need to understand that from an objective perspective, to support the full spectrum, because that’s the way the world works.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah.
Lisa Welchman
Right. So and we hope to sign up as many people as we can on our team, right? But we really need to look at it because I think if we just try to form it around one particular viewpoint, we’ll lose a lot of people, right, and we will lose the movement – sort of the full movement of people.
So if we can come up with some just general ideas about how things work or where the UXer maybe able to provide input in a large system, and then people will have to make individual choices about, “I don’t want to work on this particular thing because it’s not ethical”. And again, we hope that things get in line. I mean, I hate to say that sounds cynical but I think that’s how it works.
James Royal-Lawson
I think that’s right, let’s maybe also develop the thought just now about how what is the same kind of thing we have when we’re talking about the rise of more right wing parties, for example, in European politics or even American politics. And the thing that, well you take the conversation to them, you can’t just shun a group of people with certain opinions.
And now I’m using a very extreme example to bring it back to UX. But but the same thing with maybe the UXers that are skilled, but maybe not as ethnically developed or aware. Then ignoring those projects is not as maybe healthy as throwing yourself into them and standing up for a more ethical basis and trying to convince the project organisation to do it a different way.
Per Axbom
Actually, the people who use the dark patterns as we call them, and perhaps, work with SEO and blackhat SEO and with marketing poker sites, maybe –
Lisa Welchman
Or pornography.
Per Axbom
Or pornography, they are actually extremely skilled.
Lisa Welchman
They are, they are extremely skilled.
James Royal-Lawson
They are some of the most skilled people.
Per Axbom
Exactly. They are the ones using all the right tools, but maybe for the wrong purpose,
Lisa Welchman
Right. Yeah. And so I think that’s always very interesting and that’s been true of every technology adoption.
I mean, some of the earliest books that came out of the printing press were pornography. Yeah. Right. So this is just human nature. And so we don’t have to go with that as an individual. But I think we need to be really aware of the array of what’s there.
And that gives – that’s more of a mandate to actually understand what the dynamic it is, and what our skills can do to help influence that dynamic, or define that dynamic so that it can be managed, and that’s where my sense of objectivity, the governance work that I do – I almost don’t care what people are making, I just want the decision making around the making of it to be clear.
After that you can make something either I agree with or I don’t agree with, but you’re making it clearly. Right. And so I think this is a similar sort of thing that we really need to apply, which is, “let’s understand what we’re doing and what the role of UX is in the creation of these systems and make sure that we’re doing it consistently”. And then individuals can decide, “okay, I’m going to work in this arena, over in the dark corner, or I’m going to be over here” – I mean, this is just how it is right?
And then there’s a tug of war between what we perceive as the good and the bad, and sometimes what is obviously the good and the bad, but again, that’s the nature of reality. That’s the way things work. That’s always going to be there. And we hope that we win. [Laughter].
Per Axbom
I think the key – well, one of the keys – I don’t have the answers, is to increase more the awareness of everybody’s competence and what their actions actually mean in the end.
My example, there usually is from accessibility, where I’ve learned that telling developers that they need to have that alternative text for images that they need to think about stuff for screen readers or have bigger buttons, because people have disabilities, which make them not able to move as well as everybody else. I can tell them that stuff and sometimes they – “okay, well, I’ll just ignore that because you’re telling me how to code basically”.
But instead I involve them and show them people using websites. And they’re like, “blind people use websites? That’s crazy”. And, and then they realise, okay, and then they actually start themselves reading up on, “okay, what could I do differently in the way I code to actually help those people? Because now you’ve shown me that there are real people over there, and not just you telling me in a specification to code in a certain way”.
James Royal-Lawson
You use something more tangible to consider.
Per Axbom
That’s a theme actually I’ve taken from these days is that involving more people early on, and showing them stuff and making them part of the decision, instead of telling them what to do is really key as well.
Lisa Welchman
Well, I think one of the things I mean, that tops on a number of things for me what you’re saying because, yes, I agree that that’s true, and I think tha sometimes in our space, people aren’t, very generous with one another, right? And so there’s a number of things going on there. One is that any individual person only has a limited perspective.
You have a certain number of hours in the day, you have your life experience and the experience of those around you, you come to work, you go home, you’re hanging with your family, or friends or whatever. And you have your existence that may or may not include people with disabilities, right? And if it doesn’t, you’re ignorant, doesn’t mean you’re bad. It just means that you don’t know. And so, I think sometimes we assume that the reason why someone is making a “mistake” in an area is because they’re being aggressive, or they don’t care.
Almost all the time. It’s because they don’t know. It’s just ignorance. And so I think having them experience that, I mean, you’ve seen people be transformed, maybe they give birth to someone who has a disability of some sort, or you develop a disability, and all of a sudden, somewhere where you had no sensitivity, you have mega-sensitivity. It’s just a knowledge piece.
And I, I see that a lot, particularly working as a black woman in technology, just sort of the lack of diversity, in general, is really not good. And it has nothing really to do with discrimination, or the things that you might think of. It’s more like limited perspectives. And that’s the real loss. It’s like “you don’t see the world the way I see it. And I don’t see it the way you see it.”
And so if we don’t have enough diversity across the board, and that could mean a lot of different things. That can be global perspective, gender perspective, different types of abilities, ability to – I only speak one language, and you all speak more than one language, right? There’s all this stuff, that if we put it all in the pot, we’re going to come up with a really good solution. And so that’s really the real loss.
The rest of it is kicking and screaming and fighting and I have my days when I get annoyed because people objectify me or they think about things, but mostly I’m upset because I’m thinking, we’re creating an uninformed solution. This isn’t gonna be as good as it could be, because we’re not including all types of people. And so I think that’s something that the UX community could work on by itself, but also, as we’re looking at the broader picture, considering the diversity of view. Because that developer does want to do a good job.
I had a similar experience, once working with a client. It was a long time ago, and we were actually working on an information architecture project, and did other things, and we recorded some testing, and videotaped it, and we played it back for the management. And they were just shouting at the screen. It’s right there. Click on it. It’s in the upper right hand corner. Don’t you see it? [Laughing] No, it says fill in the blank with a word, I won’t tell you what it says because you’ll know who it is. But you know what I mean? And they were just like, but that did it. And so it was like seeing and believing with your own eyes, really makes a huge difference. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
So I think we could just as practitioners be a little bit more gentle with people, you probably don’t know a lot about their job either. Right the specifics of their job. And so we have to respect that we have a certain competency that makes us aware of certain things, and so we need to bring that to other people more gently, and invite them into the conversation instead of sort of waving our finger at them telling them that they’re doing a really bad job.
Per Axbom
Oh, excellent. Great summary.
James Royal-Lawson
A call to arms from Lisa, we’ve got to go out there and be more inclusive, do better stuff.
Per Axbom
Yeah. Thanks so much, greatly.
Lisa Welchman
You’re welcome. Thanks.
Per Axbom
Mind blown once again, just listening back to this is fantastic. As you can tell, I wasn’t ready for this conversation. I didn’t even know what we were going to be talking about. She surprised us a bit like I was saying in the interview with what she talked about at the conference because I was expecting more of a governance talk, but this was really about everything we do and our responsibility, which was amazing. And thinking about it, I’ve come to realise that she’s actually, she’s doing UX for the UX world. She’s trying to remove the obstacles, and the biggest obstacle for the digital world and UX is governance. And that’s why she’s attacking governance.
James Royal-Lawson
Well, yeah, like she said, in the very beginning of this chat, Lisa is really interested in enabling digital to happen. Governance is just what she happens to see as the blocker thing getting in the way. It’s not the kind of the means to the end. It’s not like she sets about just doing governance for the sake of governance. It’s kind of a bit surprising, but I suppose we’re learning and understanding with our chats with Lisa, that she’s a real thinker.
Per Axbom
She is and that makes you realise how many preconceptions you have about people, and you putting into one slot, and you think “that’s what they do”. I mean, we’ve had Luke Wroblewski on and he’s been the “forms guy” and then he was the “mobile first guy”. And so you’re always labelled as something. But it’s much, much more interesting when we get into these conversations when we actually talk about our profession and, “are we able to be accountable for what we do?”, which is a really interesting topic to be talking about, and we talk about it too seldom, I want to say.
James Royal-Lawson
And we do we bother – do we care about that, as individuals, you know, do we just close our eyes, get on with it?
Per Axbom
And are we realising the impact we’re having on society as a whole? That’s what I’m bringing into this as well, as people are dependent on technology these days, really, really dependent and, as Lisa said, which I really wasn’t aware of that, the UN actually, has made it a human right to access to the internet.
James Royal-Lawson
That is an immense thing that did happen a while ago, when they did that, that it is now a human right, to have access to information that is just floating around on the thing we call the internet.
Per Axbom
Which means that all activities that people are doing nowadays, and I was just riding in my car yesterday with my father-in-law, and he was asking, he’s 70, and he’s asking all these questions about Twitter and social media, because every everybody’s referencing, even in the media, he’s reading, like the papers, and he’s listening to radio, everybody’s referencing hashtags and everything all the time. He doesn’t, he doesn’t get it.
So he’s just trying to understand, and what people are just now, even if they haven’t had computers for a long time, they have to, like I was mentioning also, having to do with the school over a digital system. And what we are responsible for is, that these systems are gonna live for a long time. People are going to be dependent on them to live their lives. Are we taking enough responsibility and pushing ourselves to do our best work? Because that’s another thing she asked.
James Royal-Lawson
Are you doing your best work? Yeah. Which is an excellent question. And I think most people said no. [Laughing]
Per Axbom
Well, you don’t know.
James Royal-Lawson
Well, yeah, there was a there was not – it wasn’t a massive number of people who put their hands up and said, “yeah, just now I’m doing my best work.”
Per Axbom
And in our profession, you always have these excuses that well, “we didn’t have enough money” or “developers didn’t understand”, “the requirement specifications are all wrong”, and “you’re pushing too hard to get your people to understand the benefits of UX, but they’re just not understanding it”.
James Royal-Lawson
Or, “you did the research but didn’t do the application, so you didn’t apply what you came to as a conclusion or a suggestion”.
Per Axbom
But well, what will happen if we don’t do our best work? Will people burn out? I mean, that’s what we talked about when I talked about ego depleting systems is that people really, really feel frustrated to the extent that they actually feel bad about themselves. Which I know that another guy we talked about a lot on the show, and to on the show, Jonas Söderström.
James Royal-Lawson
Oh, yeah
Per Axbom
He’s written a book about this. And he’s talking people burn out they actually go home sick because systems are making them feel worse.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, yeah, we interviewed him a couple of years ago and he’s the author of “Stupid Bloody System”. Yeah, and there’s the English title of the book, which is an excellent read.
I think another point that Lisa brought up was was about that as an individual, you do have a limited perspective, and you do have a limited number hours in the day, so it’s impossible for you to know everything. That’s completely true. I mean, I joke about the fact it’s impossible to remember everything nowadays. I mean, there was just so much, so not only is it impossible for me to remember everything I can’t possibly know everything either. And, that ignorance doesn’t make me or other people fundamentally bad individuals. And this is such an incredibly important point that we’ve just got to remember that people can be ignorant, but still good. Yeah. Nice quality people, they’re not evil.
It made me reflect listening to that interview again, about our attitude often in, projects in meetings, client relationships, or whatever where people get frustrated or even cross or you know, we don’t get what we want in projects, and that’s a huge frustration. And that negativity pulls us all down and stops us from doing our best work and choosing our best projects. But we need to – I just love the feeling of patience you get from Lisa talking that you can, you know, take a breath and calm down a bit. Remember that these people aren’t bad. They just don’t know. Take the time to educate them or to elucidate or to actually explain and not – it’s easy for me to say, in a podcast.
Per Axbom
Sure. And we’ve talked to so many people we know about how hard it is to actually know everything in UX because it’s just impossible. But also, I loved this discussion about people not or being ignorant or not understanding enough and it makes you realise that perhaps we have a bigger responsibility to not be as hard on people to actually realise that maybe we don’t know everything they know. And so we can’t be as hard on them about the things that we think we know that they don’t. And, and we have a tendency in the UX world, I think, to actually be very harsh about what’s the right way to do it and the wrong way to do it.
James Royal-Lawson
This ties into our conversation about imposter syndrome, as well, that we’re all individuals and we have individual knowledge. And we’re, you know, you aren’t going to be a clone of someone else. Right. And that seems to remember about people who are not in the branch that you’re delivering to, were explaining to, they can’t possibly have your knowledge.
Per Axbom
Exactly. So don’t be mad at them, and try to help them or system or at least be understanding, like, be more human about it, is what she’s saying. And I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been on projects where eventually I actually give up, I succumb to the culture of the project, and I realised okay, I’ll just do my job. I’ll stop arguing I’ll do my job. And thinking that well that’s okay, at least at least, the client is getting what they want.
But in the end, perhaps I’m realising that the user isn’t getting what they should be getting to feel better about themselves and feel better about the product and the service. And essentially, if you’re working with big huge systems, which are systems that will go out into society and, and be systems that people are interacting with, for everyday activities, like school and health and all those sorts of types of services like public transport, and when she was saying, “are you doing your best work?”, that’s why I realised and talking to her afterwards, if I don’t do my best work in that situation, if I do give up and succumb to that feeling of, “they will not understand, so I’ll just stop trying, I’ll just do these interaction design sketches and be done with it, and they’ll be happy, and I will get paid”. But more and more, I’ll actually try and not give up, is what I’m thinking. Yeah. And that’s understanding the impact of what Lisa is saying.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, we need to be better at standing up. And, you know, pushing for what we believe in. It’s not gonna be easy. For somebody, depending on how your role is, I mean, whether you’re in-house or, a consultant or, you know, working for an agency that might put you in quite difficult situation.
Per Axbom
Exactly. So what we need to be working more on is communication and communication about the worth or the value that we’re bringing into a project or anything that we’re working with. And make sure that people do understand that and understand the processes around it. Understand the benefits of working in a user centric way and the benefits not only to that product or service, but to the society as a whole.
James Royal-Lawson
And maybe if you don’t feel if you don’t feel like you can communicate some of these issues or problems, then talk to a colleague or someone else maybe on the project and see if you can, you can work a way of communicating it together. Because it’s I mean, not everyone is as good as each other at communicating certain, I’ll bring you up certain issues, or highlighting them or explaining them. But a couple of people together can make a big difference, perhaps.
Per Axbom
I’ll actually be doing a talk in a month for a client, where I’ll be criticising the way the client works. [Laughing] And getting paid for it. [Laughing]
James Royal-Lawson
Well done.
Per Axbom
Yes. [Laughing] In the sense that I’m realising that we’re sitting in all these meetings, and nobody has the data to back up any of the things that they’re suggesting, and they fail to prioritise. And what I’m hoping is that they will realise that paying more attention to data is going to help them feel better about their jobs, because then they’ll stop worrying so much about if they’re doing the right thing. Because if you pay attention to the data, it will be much easier to realise if you’re doing the right thing
James Royal-Lawson
Or if you I suppose, lifting a bit broader than just data, although I really agree with you, if you can create a climate and a culture where people skills are trusted, or opinions are trusted, whether those opinions are based on on education or on data, or life experience.
Per Axbom
You know, and when I say criticise, I’m actually using that word, perhaps in the wrong sense, because I won’t go that hard on them. I’ll probably paint a picture of “here’s a good way of working and this is why this is a good way of workIng”.
James Royal-Lawson
Exactly how you’re bound to offer them a solution.
Per Axbom
Yes, just speaking of communication going hard on somebody is perhaps not the best approach.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I remember that – now we’ve – I’ve got a flashback to a workshop I did anyway, with Dave Gray, a few years ago. And one of the exercises he did was the exercise where you have to be positive in response to someone.
So it’s a dream for someone to describe their dream home. And the first part of the exercise, you respond to everything they say, by criticising. “Oh, no, but that you don’t want it to be kind of, you know, too sunny in the back of the house, because it’ll just get really warm and you won’t want to be you know – you want to be outside of the back where you don’t want to be inside all the time.
And then then you go on like this the whole conversation, then you switch. So the second time you do it, you switch around, and then you reply, always a positive thing. “Oh, that sounds fantastic. That’d be so sunny at the back of the house”, and like, okay, you could bake in a maybe it’s like, little kind of criticism, but try always to be positive with a response to it.
Per Axbom
Yeah. I’ve done a – actually I did a weekend course. And when you say improvisational theatre. I’m trying to directly translate from Swedish there. You have to improvise. And if you’re interacting with people on stage, you can never, never, never say no or go against what they’re saying. Because essentially, what you’re re playing stops because they don’t understand where you are going with that. Because if you stop me, in my, in my step trying to get somewhere, then I don’t know what to do. But if you actually embrace that, but maybe steer it in a different direction later on, that will work. So you can’t stop people in their step that just doesn’t work.
James Royal-Lawson
No. Quite right. Thank you for listening. You can turn off now. Just kidding. This podcast has been a repeat show from our archives. Let us know which of your favourite episodes over the years, you think should be repeated.
Per Axbom
And if you’d like to contribute to funding UX podcast, then visit www.uxpodcast.com/support.
Remember to keep moving.
James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.
[Music]
Per Axbom
Hey James, did you know I decided to sell my vacuum cleaner?
James Royal-Lawson
No, I didn’t Per.
Per Axbom
Yeah, it was just gathering dust.
James Royal-Lawson
Oh.
This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom, and Lisa Welchman originally recorded in May 2015 and published as Episodes 107 and 240 of UX Podcast.